Search engines, such as are used in conjunction with the Word Wide Web, are typically expected to search through vast amounts of data, yet return a manageable number of quality, relevant results. When attempting to determine which results are most relevant to a user, search engines generally evaluate prospective results for such factors as the number of occurrences of a search term and how close to the top of the document the search term occurs. In some cases, query-independent scores are assigned to individual documents. For example, a query-independent score may be assigned to a page based on the number of other pages which link to it. Such scores may also be taken into account by the search engine when attempting to return the most relevant results.
In some cases, the relevancy of a particular result may depend on the context of the query. For example, suppose that a user submits a query of “jaguar price.” A query-independent score does not differentiate results based on context and thus the same hits will be returned to the user, irrespective of whether that user is interested in the car, the cat, or the operating system. There thus exists a continuing need to be able to provide relevant results in response to queries.